French political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempts to answer what is the origin of inequality among men in his “Discourse of the Origin of Inequality”. This document seeks to show how the growth of civilization corrupts man's natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege. Rousseau states that primitive man is equal to his fellows because he can be independent of them, but as society becomes more sophisticated, the strongest and most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage over their the other, and the constitutions set up to rectify these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but enable them.
Rousseau frequently refers to man before the growth of civilization living in a Utopia where man lies at the foot of trees and lives according to nature. He realizes that this Utopia is an abstraction, and claims that natural inequality d...